It’s been about six months since Dick Blick Art Materials acquired Primary Art Supply, a locally owned business that had been on the vanguard of the Broughton Street resurgence.

I caught up last week with Primary co-owner Robyn Reeder and longtime employee Sebastian Edwards to talk about the transition.

Edwards is now a salaried Blick employee, and Reeder is a consultant.

Reeder admitted she initially was skeptical that Blick could do much better sales than Primary did. After all, Primary built a strong brand over the years, had a dedicated following and occupied a prime spot on the first block of East Broughton.

“We’re blowing Primary’s numbers out of the water,” Reeder said last week. “There’s this whole new customer base.”

Part of that is surely due to Blick’s sheer size in the newly renovated space at 318 East Broughton St.

Reeder also noted that Blick’s online presence and national reputation were obvious draws. The store attracts a large number of “crafters,” according to Reeder, and does not rely as much on SCAD students as Primary did.

Plus that block of Broughton typically offers easy on-street parking.

Reeder and Edwards were candid in talking about the adjustments to a more demanding business model.

While Blick brought a more rigid business model, the company recognized the value of Primary’s history in the community.

On one wall are giant sculptures of tubes of paint that Edwards originally constructed for one of Primary’s signature window displays.

On another wall hang works by Savannah-based painter Panhandle Slim.

The upstairs gallery has been home to a variety of workshops and classes. From 6 to 8 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 6, Blick will host a reception for a Holiday Pop Art Show by Zteven Zangbang. The show will continue into the new year.

Reeder has also discovered that her new block of Broughton hasn’t received the same attention as the one between Bull and Drayton. She’s working with the city to get trash cans, street trees, appropriate lighting and a paved lane.

Reeder and her business partner Amy Spurlock are still looking for a tenant for the old Primary space at 14 East Broughton St. They also own the building at 22 East Broughton Street, where Reeder’s vintage clothing store Civvies occupies the second floor.

In a great new development, Graveface Records & Curiosities on 40th Street plans to open a second store inside Civvies. More on that in 2013.

As I left Blick after talking to Edwards and Reeder, I was struck by how similar it all felt to similar conversations at Primary in years past.

I’ve written often in this column about the relationship between national chains and locally owned stores in the downtown economy. As is evident in the story of Primary, Blick and Civvies, that relationship is a complex and often complementary one.

Downsides of bringing St. Pat’s wristbands back

City of Savannah staff and the Savannah Waterfront Association want to bring wristbands back to the long St. Patrick’s Day weekend.

The $5 bands would allow wearers to drink on the street as far south as Broughton Street between Drayton and MLK.

Yes, wristband sales would help pay for entertainment stages, extra police and a variety of other needs.

But the wristband policy will create many problems.

First, keep in mind that those of us who frequent downtown bars and clubs can drink on the street any night of the week. Charging us to do something that we can legally do year-round will discourage us from going into the festival zone at all.

Of course, most bars will still do plenty of business without us — sometimes more than they can reasonably handle.

But establishments that appeal primarily to an older, local clientele are going to see fewer of their regulars.

And we should want to have older regulars among the visiting partiers. This is not rocket science. The more the crowd skews toward young people from out of town, the wilder the partying will be.

We can call it a “festival zone” or “entertainment zone” all we want, but many young adults are going to hear “party zone” or, more specifically, “drinking zone.”

Also, the proposed party zone includes a number of nicer restaurants. It’s easy to imagine that this move will hurt their dinner business.

More importantly, an expansion of the party zone requires more ID checkpoints for wristband sales. Those will eat up countless hours of security personnel and potentially create choke points.

When lines develop, there will inevitably be frustrations and altercations.

The proposed festival zone also includes a significant number of hotels and residences.

If the folks manning the checkpoints are overly aggressive, residents and hotel guests will repeatedly have to explain why they aren’t buying wristbands. Ditto for their visitors and for others who don’t plan on drinking outdoors.

Some folks will enter the zone with plans to drink only inside, not outside. But then they will end up feeling trapped and adding to the congestion in an overly crowded bar.

So I’ll make a prediction.

If we move ahead with this plan, we’ll hear repeated bemoaning of the “unintended consequences” both for law-abiding citizens and for police officers.

Some of those consequences might be unintended, but they’re entirely predictable.

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